They say children have vivid imaginations. What they don’t tell you is that sometimes their daydreams spill over, inviting nightmares into our waking world.
My granddaughter, who I’ll refer to as Ada, is seven years old. Her parents died last year in a terrible fire. I’d prefer not to be specific about my location but if you’re a New England local you may have seen it on the news.
I’ve since become Ada’s sole guardian. This is a responsibility I love, but as I get older I confess I’ve been running low on patience and have been more prone to lashing out or giving her the cold shoulder. I say this in the interest of transparency – I have to be honest about my part in things.
Ada has always been a daydreamer. She spends hours pretending to be an astronaut exploring deep space, and she takes her astronaut doll everywhere she goes. She disappears so deeply into these stories that it’s almost like she’s in a trance. It’s a really special quality of hers, and I hope one day she gets to use these talents as a professional writer or storyteller. The intensity of her imagination has always been more extreme than other kids’ her age, but she’s otherwise been developing “normally”, more or less, so I haven’t paid it much mind.
That is, until recently. It started with little things at first. Objects would go missing, only to turn up in the most unlikely of places. The oven timer in the bathroom sink, the TV remote in the refrigerator.
When I’d ask her about it, she’d seem genuinely perplexed, as if she had no memory of moving things. She’s always been somewhat absent-minded, so I tempered my concerns. But when I pressed her, she’d say things like: “It wasn’t me, Mimi, it was her.”
“Who, Ada?”
“She lives in the woods.” Ada replied. “She looks like me. But she doesn’t have a home. She hates us. Because we get to turn on the lights at night and be warm.”
Sometimes she looks out the window and tells me she can see “Her” in the forest that abuts our property. When I get to the window she tells me I just missed her.
“She doesn’t like it when you look at her.”
At late hours of the night I hear Ada talking to herself. When I knock on her door to check on her, she claims she can’t sleep because of the “voices outside.” Mind you, she and I both sleep on the second floor.
It’s an old house without an alarm system, and we’re close enough to the train station, so we get all sorts of types occasionally wandering into our neighborhood. Petty crime and break-ins are not uncommon, so the idea of an intruder has always been a fear. Our doors have strong locks but the house has its original wooden country window frames – if anyone wanted to, they’d have little trouble shimmying a window open. I’m overdue to have them retrofitted with proper locks, but this house requires so much maintenance, and having been retired for over a decade I don’t have endless financial resources for renovations.
Once this winter I woke up in the dead of night. My room was absolutely pitch black, and silent – save for the sound of someone quietly breathing.
I whispered her name. “Ada?”
Nothing. Just quiet breathing.
I fumbled in the dark and eventually found the pull string for the bedside light. I clicked it on.
And there she was, standing by my bed, looking straight through me with a cold, detached gaze. If I’m being honest it was somewhat unsettling, but Ada’s late mother used to sleepwalk too so I knew not to startle her. But then I noticed that Ada was gripping a pair of scissors. I gently pulled them from her fist and was alarmed to see they were caked with dried blood. Of course I immediately hid them in my cabinet and guided Ada back to bed.
The next morning I found a bird on our doormat with some gruesome injuries. Ada denies any involvement, but I wasn’t born yesterday. I immediately hid all the knives and sharps in the house, and started to question if her “imaginative” world might be a sign of deeper psychological issues.
I’ve considered seeking professional help, but I’m apprehensive about how Ada would react. She’s homeschooled so most of the time it’s just her and myself in the house, along with our live-in helper – and Ada doesn’t usually react well to new people. I have guests coming over for an Easter party at the end of the month and I’m just so worried that she won’t be able to keep it together, or that she’ll make a scene, or worse… that she’ll do something to harm herself.
This last week she’s been isolating, spending hours alone in her room drawing or whispering to herself. And then there’s her sudden mood swings—she’ll go from laughing and playing one moment to withdrawing into herself and refusing to speak the next, sometimes for hours on end.
I tried gently raising my concerns with Ada. The first time she flew into a rage and simply started screaming. Any attempts I’ve made to communicate with her since have resulted in her completely shutting down and becoming totally unresponsive.
I had been telling myself this was a phase, but tonight something happened that I just can’t explain.
I was lying in bed, trying to push away the creeping sense of unease that had become my nightly reality. The wind was whipping through the trees, as a cold front had rolled in after a few unseasonably warm days. Normally I find it comforting, but I kept hearing sounds in the wind – like laughter – and I just couldn’t shake this eerie feeling.
And then I saw her.
At first, I thought it was a trick of the moonlight filtering through the trees. But sure enough, faintly within the black rectangle of my bedroom window I started to perceive a face.
She looked just like Ada, but with inky black eyes, her nose pressed against the glass, her dark eyes wide and unblinking as she stared at me. When we locked eyes my stomach twisted in cold panic, but I was completely frozen in shock, my heart in my throat. And then, the worst part… she smiled.
I stumbled out of bed and rushed to the window, my heart pounding in my ears – and watched as the girl’s face sank away into nothingness, as if disappearing beneath dark water. I could see my own reflection on the glass and my breath creating condensation clouds as I searched the night for movement, when…
WHAM.
Ada’s astronaut doll thudded against my window, its blank expression staring back at me as it dangled from some sort of rope tied around its neck. I must have shrieked, and I soon found myself racing down the hall to Ada’s room.
As I opened the door, my heart stopped.
Ada was there sleeping peacefully in her bed, just as I had left her, her breath rising and falling. I reached out to shake her awake. But as I touched her shoulder, she stirred and rolled over, murmuring in her sleep.
“Nobody ever listens.”
She was right. I hadn’t listened.
The floorboards above our heads creaked and groaned. Someone – or someTHING – was prowling in the attic.
I fumbled for the wall phone in the hallway, my fingers shaking as I dialed 911. But as the line rang on the other end, a sense of futility washed over me. I turned and saw a dark figure standing over Ada’s bed.
And I suddenly knew that girl wasn’t outside at all.
From the phone receiver, I heard a voice croak…
“Dance, puppet, dance.”